ART

ART; Expansionist Designs on an Old Power Plant

By ALAN RIDING

Published: January 8, 1995

LONDON—
EMPIRE BUILDER? Nicholas Serota hardly looks the part. His soft-spoken manner, rimless glasses and slim frame suggest an esthete rather than a power broker. He even grows edgy at the suggestion that as director of the Tate Gallery of London, he is displaying inordinate imperial ambitions. "Well, we're not doing anything abroad yet," he said with a nervous laugh.

Still, in the six years since he took over Britain's foremost museum of British and modern art, the Tate has opened two popular out-of-town branches, one in Liverpool, the other at St. Ives, on the Cornish coast. Now, in its most daring expansion since it was founded in 1897, the Tate plans to turn an abandoned power station on the south side of the Thames into Bankside, a museum for modern art that will be even larger than its Millbank headquarters on the north bank. The branch is expected to open by the year 2000.

So, for all his self-effacing Englishness, Mr. Serota is much in the news these days. He has enemies who mock his taste in avant-garde art and accuse him of self-aggrandizement. He has admirers who applaud the way he has run the Tate and are excited at the prospect of a "new" Tate. But, either way, Mr. Serota, a 48-year-old art historian, has the museum's future in his hands.

That is not how he would put it. He bows dutifully to the Tate's trustees as the real decision makers. He has only one vote on the five-member jury for the prestigious annual Turner Prize for contemporary art, which is awarded by the Tate. He is just one of 10 jurors who later this month will pick the architect for Bankside from among six finalists in a competition that began last fall. But, in London art circles at least, no one doubts his influence.

He will need it in the coming months. He is confident of squeezing the private sector for a third of the $120 million cost of transforming the old Bankside Power Station, a monolithic red-brick building opposite St. Paul's Cathedral. For $80 million, the Tate is counting on a grant from the Millennium Fund, which is being fed by profits from Britain's new National Lottery. And if the money from the fund doesn't come through? "It will be a long haul," Mr. Serota said glumly.

It would also be the first setback in a charmed career. Born in London of Russian parents, Mr. Serota studied economics at Cambridge but soon switched to art history. After a stint at the Courtauld Institute, he worked for the Arts Council until, in 1973, at the age of 27, he became director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Three years later he took over as director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, as good a training as any for his position at the Tate.

Mr. Serota's new visibility will, he hopes, sway public opinion to the view that the Tate should be more than a poor cousin of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris. And for those more interested in real estate than art, he has the additional argument that the new museum branch will revitalize the rundown borough of Southwark and even enhance the City, the financial center across the water.

The moment may be right. In the 1980's, while Paris was showing off I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre, the Opera Bastille and the Grande Arche de la Defense, London was spoiling its skyline with mediocre high-rise office towers. Now, it seems, embarrassed by its reputation for indifference to culture, even the Tory Government favors marking the year 2000 with a few prestigious architectural projects.

Not that Mr. Serota has stopped looking enviously across the Channel. "We could do a lot with the sort of money that flows into the arts in France," he said. "I don't think we're doing things the proper way here. I think the state has a strategic role to play in culture, rather than one that simply responds to pressures. They do that in France, and they do it effectively."

A subversive view, perhaps, for someone appointed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But Mr. Serota has had six years to contemplate the shortage of funds for acquisitions. He has found all too few wealthy benefactors. And, even with funds from the lottery, he worries. "There is real concern that new buildings will be built and existing buildings will be improved and there'll be nothing to put in them," he said.

That, at least, is not the Tate's problem, with 75 percent of its approximately 6,000 paintings and sculptures in storage. Even with its displays at Millbank changing every year and part of its collection rotated to Liverpool and St. Ives, many works are never seen. And its perennial lack of space is compounded by the museum's split personality: it is both a gallery of British art since the 16th century and a gallery of modern international art.

The great appeal of the Bankside project is that it is a two-in-one solution: it will provide more than 120,000 square feet of new gallery space and also permit the Tate to separate its collections. Millbank, which has the monumental Turner Collection in its adjacent Clore Gallery, will become the Tate Gallery of British Art, while Bankside will become the Tate Gallery of Modern Art.

An anonymous donation of $18 million has enabled work to start on new galleries at Millbank, but the real challenge will be transforming the 8.5-acre site at Bankside. The great industrial edifice that the museum will occupy was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1947 and built in two stages between 1948 and 1963, when it began operating as a power station. It ceased operations in 1981. Today it stands empty, its square brick chimney reminiscent of an earlier era, its vast space -- 500 feet long, 300 feet wide and 85 feet high -- awaiting an architect.

The Tate's trustees have laid down guidelines. They want the new museum well integrated with its surroundings, which will include the almost-completed replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theater. They also hope that Bankside can be linked to the City by a footbridge. In the building itself, they envision five galleries for the permanent collection and one for exhibitions, and they favor a rooftop restaurant with a river view. After that, it will be up to the winning architect.

How daring will the choice be? In the first round of the competition, 148 architects submitted their names. In September, 13 were invited to present a rough draft of their ideas. Then came a surprise. When the six finalists were picked in November, only one, David Chipperfield, was British, and he was perhaps the least experienced.

Britain's two best-known architects, Sir Norman Foster and Sir Richard Rogers, did not submit bids because of other commitments, but the selection of five non-British finalists also reflected the Tate's eagerness to be different. Mr. Serota makes no secret of his preference. "I think a foreign architect doing something major on a museum in this city would be exciting for London," he said.

The foreign finalists are Renzo Piano of Italy, who designed the Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan; Rafael Moneo, best known for the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain; Tadao Ando, who recently completed the Garden of Fine Art in Kyoto, Japan; Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Switzerland, whose works include the gallery for the Goetz Collection in Munich, and the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus, whose office redesigned the city center in Lille, France.

Bankside will house some 1,000 paintings and sculptures, distributed chronologically through five main galleries. While the Tate could easily fill this space with works it already has, Mr. Serota is hoping to plug "holes" through acquisitions, notably of works of Russian constructivism, Cubism and Latin American art.

He also intends to keep buying contemporary art, despite the regular pasting he gets from some British critics for his taste in avant-garde installations and sculptures. If the Tate has "enormous gaps" in its collection, he said, timorous policies of the past were to blame. But Brian Sewell, art critic of The London Evening Standard and a campaigner against the Tate's director, said he should worry more about the "wretched" state of the permanent collection.

"By all means, give Serota Bankside," Mr. Sewell said in an interview. "But don't let it be called the Tate. It should be called the Serota Gallery, and he can fill it with the international school of rubbish."

Yet for all the controversy stirred by the purchase of, say, Carl Andre's pile of firebricks, the Tate has never been more popular. And, for this, Mr. Serota can take credit. In 1988, some 500,000 people visited Millbank; in 1994, the number was close to two million. The Liverpool Tate, which opened in 1988, now has about 600,000 visitors a year, while in its first year the Tate in St. Ives had 200,000 visitors.

Should museums measure their success through such numbers? Mr. Serota paused before replying, then rephrased the question. "How can you preserve the sense of intimate relationship with a group of watercolors when you have 2,000 people marching through the gallery?" he asked. At Bankside, he conceded, that may be the ultimate challenge -- "for people to have private and intimate relationships with works of arts and not simply to tramp through grand halls, enjoying some quasi-cultural experience in the company of 5,000 others."

Photo: Nicholas Serota and Giacometti sculptures in the Tate Gallery -- "I don't think we're doing things the proper way here." (Jonathan Player for The New York Times)